August CDN Ecosystem Updates

CloudFlare to offer Free SSL Certs

CloudFlare announced that it’s going to be offering SSL (HTTPS) certificates to all customers, including non-paying customers. This is in response to Google’s announcement that they will be giving preference to website rankings for those sites running on HTTPS. When it comes to SSL certs in the CDN industry, there are three different types:

Shared HTTPS: Low cost cert where a customer domain runs under the domain of the CDN

Standard (Single Name) SSL Cert: Cert that works for a single customer domain running on a CDN

CloudFront is most likely to offer the Standard (Single Name) SSL Cert. On another side note, Google actions will impact to the industry when it comes to firewall traffic. HTTPS runs on port 443, and HTTP runs on port 80. Firewalls around the world are going to see a massive jump in port 443 traffic, as millions of sites start deploying SSL. Also, lets not forget that SSL requires a lot more steps in the handshake process, thus impacting page load times. According to Microsoft,the SSL handshake takes 9 to 10 steps for an SSL handshake to complete.

Finally, this decision is going to cost CloudFlare millions of dollars annually. Digicert offers a 1 year Standard SSL Cert for $175 per year. CloudFlare has 1.9M free customers. If 1M non-paying customer sign up for free SSL certs, it will cost CloudFlare tens of millions of dollars per year. That’s unless CloudFlare made a special arrangement with a Registrar to purchase certs at an incredible discount. Regardless, CloudFlare economics just doesn’t make sense.

Telstra Acquires Ooyala

Telstra, Australia’s largest Telco, has acquired 98% of Ooyala for $270M. The acquisition leaves Brightcove and Kaltura as the only two large OVP players in the ecosystem. Brightcove is the only pure-play OVP company that is public, and their stock still hasn’t recovered since acquiring Unicorn Media. The acquisition is going to impact the OVP segment somewhat, and especially Kaltura, as they are now the only large global private OVP company, with added pressure to sell the company. On the bright side, Kaltura has been adding features at a rapid pace, surpassing even Brightcove. Is Kaltura getting acquired next? Maybe, and the best home for them is IBM. IBM is the perfect candidate, especially since they acquired Aspera. Adding Kaltura to the portfolio mix will definitely help IBM combat Amazon in the video creation-delivery niche.

EdgeCast DNS, 13x Faster than Amazon, and 10X faster than Google

EdgeCast has just announced that its DNS services is the worlds fastest, faster than DynDNS, UltraDNS, CloudFlare, Amazon, CDNetworks, Google, and many others. In their early days, EdgeCast was a partner with DynDNS, but after a few years, they decided to enter the DNS business, and it was a very smart choice, as DNS and CDN go hand-in-hand. The DNS performance numbers that EdgeCast published are insane. Based on SolveDNS, EdgeCast is almost 10x faster than Google, and almost 13x faster than Amazon Route 53.